Today, many worldwide web pages (HTML documents) are available that offer an abundance of viewable images. On a traditional desktop or laptop computer with a large screen running a standard web browser, these images are easily arranged and displayed for viewing. For example, web sites for searching realtor property listings often deliver a plurality of images for the viewer to quickly scan for a property of interest. When the user identifies a property of interest, they can then read the details associated with the image of that specific property and select that image for further details about the property.
At the same time, the field of communications, and more specifically wireless telecommunications, is currently undergoing a radical expansion. This technological expansion allows an electronic device, such as mobile personal digital assistant (PDA), cellular phone, pager, and other electronic devices to connect to the same information sources, such as a web server or database, as one could with the PC and a PC-based browser. Several small device client browsers are available which deliver content from the web to the handheld devices.
However, these small devices typically lack the screen space or navigation capabilities to display web content intended for display on a desktop or laptop computer. Thus, there are a number of techniques client browsers utilize to assist the user in navigating the web pages on the small screens. For handheld device users interested in scanning web pages with a significant amount of image content, these browsers require that the user manually scroll thru all the content on the page in one of the traditional viewing modes. This can be a slow process as there can be a significant amount of text and other information intermingled between images for the user to scroll through.